11

Something greeted her after the surface of the ship, Lodka, had opened up a puckered hole, drawn her inside and then closed behind her. It looked like a blood cell, circular, red. Like a doughnut ring with the centre hole filled in. It hovered, waiting, as Demi tested the atmosphere with her EVA suit sensors and then switched off the helmet-like force field. There was air, here. Clean, fresh and with hint of strawberries.

The room, if she could call it that, what with Lap still holding her glasses, she couldn't say for certain, looked nothing like any room on a ship she had ever seen. Flesh-like walls held pulsing veins, or tubes that looked like veins, that were visible through the almost translucent surface. The floor, though not soft, looked as though it should be. Soft, gooey and sticky, but her feet did not sink into it. She felt thankful for that, at least.

The blood cell bobbed up and down and then floated towards an opening and Demi didn't want to imagine what that opening looked like. It paused, turned in the air as though looking at her, and then turned again, bobbing forward. Demi assumed the blood cell expected her to follow it and, with nothing better to do, she did.

The corridors of the ship resembled intestines. That was the only way she could describe them. Similar, flesh-like walls, but ribbed and tubular. Similar corridors came and went on either side as the blood cell led the way. Some were huge, large enough for five, six people to walk side-by-side. Others only large enough for something the size of the floating blood cell to enter and, as she dipped her head to look, Demi saw flashes of dozens, hundreds of those blood cells rushing through those thinner corridors.

They passed through halls and landings above areas that, on a planet, could be described as chasms. Those chasms receded downward and upward, disappearing into darkness. All along the way, Demi had the feeling that she was not alone. Not only because of the blood cell leading her, but something else. A presence that touched her mind, through her implant, and that presence felt curious about Demi. And a little jealous. How Demi knew that, she couldn't possibly say, but she did.

Then she realised she could feel Gal-Net. The intra-galactic information network had a presence here and Demi connected to it. The connection felt odd. Slimy. As though it had passed through a clogged waste disposal unit. Still, it felt better than not having a connection at all. She tried searching for any references to a ship like Lodka, as she walked, but there was nothing. Literally nothing. No-one, in the entire known history of the galaxy, had ever encountered anything like it.

"Welcome to Lodka!" Friss, sat upon a chair that looked like a malformed hand, greeted her with wide open arms and a grin on his face that would split any other person's face in half. "We'll assign quarters for you in a moment, but first, I have to introduce you to Lodka, or she'll get grumpy."

"The force field opened, for the impound yard. It opened before I cracked the last security level." Demi looked across to another hand-shaped seat, where Lap sat, their two-dimensional hand rolling fingers in greeting. "I take it the crashing of that skiff prompted it?"

"Yes, well, seems we didn't need you for that after all. They thought we were there to help. More fool them. Never mind, eh?" A low rumbling appeared to come from all around, the flesh walls trembling, and Friss stroked one of the 'fingers' of his chair. "It's alright, old girl, I'm getting to it. Lodka, this is Demi Quaver-Tempura, a nice woman that's helping us get Bognrd back and ... other things. Demi, this is Lodka. Play nice, she's very sensitive about her weight and can be incredibly petty."

He added those last words in a whisper, holding his open hand beside his face, as though that could stop Lodka from hearing him. It didn't work. The walls of this room, almost empty but for the two hand-chairs and their occupants, shook once again. Then both hand-chairs appeared to slough away, diminishing and falling into the hard flesh of the floor of the room. Friss fell on his backside, but Lap managed to stand before their chair disappeared.

"Hello, Lodka. Pleased to meet you. Sorry Friss is an idiot." Demi didn't feel she had much to lose and decided talking to the ship was among the least weird things she had done in her life. She felt something pressed into her hand and smiled as a thank you to Lap for giving her back her glasses. "Do you have friends, Lodka? I hope we can become friends, if that's alright?"

Without warning, Demi felt something touch her backside. She yelped, jumping away and swatting her hand behind her, only to find that a flesh hand-chair had grown from the floor. Lodka had given Demi somewhere to sit. With tentative, careful movements, Demi sat down in the chair. She didn't want Lodka to think she didn't appreciate sitting upon something that looked like a lab experiment gone wrong. It felt surprisingly comfortable. And warm. And it vibrated, a little, which Demi didn't know whether to enjoy or feel nauseated by.

"Right! Until Lodka forgives me, which may take a while, we'll have to do this standing up. Well, I will. She seems to like you." A hint of menace entered Friss' voice in that last sentence and he squinted at Demi before holding his hands out before him. "Lodka, we're going to need navigation, weapons, view-screen and a deli counter. We're going Bognrd hunting!"

Two things began to form from the flesh floor of the room. They bubbled and squirmed up from the floor, forming into two objects that looked more than a little like corpses in the middle of a particularly invasive autopsy. Friss delved fingers into the open cavity of one corpse-like console and Lap did the same with the one before them.

A flap of material that looked like skin unfurled from the ceiling of the room and Demi, after replacing her glasses upon her head, could see images forming upon it. Galactic maps, thin veins and capillaries becoming intra-galactic highways and trade routes, appeared on the skin-screen, along with images from outside Lodka. Demi knew it was outside Lodka, because she recognised the remains of several ships within the impound yard.

To the side, along the wall, something akin to a table grew from the flesh wall and then several arms, similar to the one that had brought her on to Lodka, but very much smaller, appeared through puckered holes that opened in the wall. These arms carried a tray each and, upon each tray, Demi could see a number of different meats sliced to perfection and garnished with various vegetables and, she hoped, edible leaves. She had absolutely no intention of eating anything on this ship. Ever.

"So, you know where to find this Bognrd, then? Are my talents required to break him out of prison, or something? Is he languishing in a cell, awaiting the death penalty or, worse, a lifetime in virtual twentieth century Gateshead?" Demi had decided she quite liked the ambient vibrations of the hand-chair, her fingernails digging into the finger armrest. "And, you do know that Lodka looks a little like a supremely well-shaped pair of buttocks and accompanying legs, don't you?"

"Oh, yeah. I know. Mmm." The lusty tone of Friss' voice almost made Demi vomit, but he shook his head, bringing his focus and attention back to the matters at hand. "Actually, no, I don't know exactly where Bognrd is. He moves around a lot. So, yes, I'm going to need your talents to locate him. I assume you've already connected with Gal-Net? Good. Get cracking. Oh, and get a good grip. This is going to get weird."

He wasn't lying. One second, Demi had an interesting sensation starting to enter her nethers, the next, it felt as though a plug-hole had opened up, swallowing the entire universe into a teeny-tiny hole far too small for anything to have any right to pass through. Demi felt absolutely certain she heard a slurping sound, but that could have simply happened due to the chair Demi sat on.

Demi felt squished. Flattened and squeezed into an area the size of a quark. Or smaller. This was, of course, impossible, but some technologies seemed to take impossible as some kind of challenge, standing drunkenly in front of impossible and daring it hit first. Nothing longer than a fraction of a fraction of a second could possibly have passed, but Demi felt as though the universe had died of extreme old age and become regurgitated from some unknowable creature. Or the universe was the creature. She couldn't tell.

Then everything felt normal again and, as she tried to collect her thoughts and count her appendages, thankful that she hadn't, in fact, grown several hundred more arms, Demi looked toward the skin flap view-screen and saw something that resembled the inside of a wormhole, but decidedly more flesh-like. It looked as though they were racing through the innards of a creature so enormous, it could cover the entire galaxy, the universe, even.

This was unlike any other form of travel Demi had encountered. She had travelled through wormholes, the safest, though not the fastest method of space travel. She had spent time on a warp ship, pulling along a dwarf star to power the folding of space-time in order to thrust a quarter of a centimetre forward, but travelling several hundred light years. The possibility of the warp ship's force fields breaking down and the gravity of the dwarf star devouring the ship meant that Demi had only tried that once. For a dare.

There were other methods of travel, of course, though most were proprietary, wholly-owned by DWAIt Corp but not as profitable as wormhole drives, or were so vastly, mind-bogglingly dangerous as to preclude anyone using them more than once. A lot of the time, it was all three reasons why people stuck to the more sedate pace of wormhole travel. This form of travel, whatever it was called seemed like a speeded up form of wormhole travel. Through bowels. The tunnel structures Lodka travelled through looked like bowels.

"I think I'm going to be sick." Demi turned to the side and a bucket, made of flesh, grew from the floor.

That did not help.